Skyfire Flash-friendly iPhone app now available, then not

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Apple has now approved Skyfire 2.0, the world's first mobile browser for the iPhone and iPod touch that provides users with a full Flash-friendly web experience.

The inability to play Flash on the iDevice has long been the bug-bear of many a user, but now thanks to the Skyfire app a major gap has been bridged between Apple and Adobe - although it remains thoroughly virtual as we can't see the two companies kissing and making up just yet.

As previously reported on Pocket-lint, the Skyfire app manages to play Flash video by converting Flash into H.264 (a codec for HTML5).

"We are excited to launch in the Apple App Store,” said Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck. “Our technology meets a need for consumers who want to get more from their web browsing on iPhones and iPod touches, including videos designed for Flash Player and many other new browsing features".

As the Skyfire browser is based on the same WebKit core used by Safari, users will still get all the capabilities of Safari plus new features from Skyfire.

As well as the Flash video, which will be displayed in a thumbnail, you'll get a whole host of other features, including a Share icon which will allow you to spread articles around Twitter and Facebook.

UPDATE: Skyfire seems to have been overwhelmed and has pulled the iPhone app from the store. In a statement it had the following to say:

"Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections.

The user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.

Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store. We are working really hard to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as we can support it.

We are very grateful for the demand. Within 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Wow!

Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned.